Ark maintains strict code quality guidelines to ensure ease of development, but also lower the risk of vulnerabilities due to unclear code errors. When patching a vulnerability, we are even more strict concerning quality.

First of all, a patch must conform to our usual coding standards, which may be found here. To summarize:

New additions must include tests using the jest test suite.

Code must pass formatting checks by linters such as JSLint.

Dependencies must not contain any vulnerabilities. (attempting to minimize dependencies is a decent way to prevent this.)

Ensure the burden of maintainability is as low as possible, by ensuring the code is clear and logical.

The last point is of special interest ton patches. It might be convenient to add a code rule such as:

// some pseudocodeif(block.id === someID){patch(block)}

However, over time such patches become cumbersome, difficult to maintain or are reverted due to a switch in developers and lack of understanding of the underlying problem. Attempt to minimize exceptional cases when writing patches.